Teacher Guide

Heart of Darkness Lesson Plan

Relationship to Other Books

One of Conrad's harshest critics has been Chinua Achebe. Achebe has written several novels about Africa that invoke the perspective of Africans, not of invading Europeans. In Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the account is told in narrative form rather than historical reportage, and this makes it somewhat more subjectively interesting to the average reader. Achebe describes how life was lived before colonization, before the abuses of Marlow's Company and others like it.

Heart of Darkness Questions and Answers

They were only three miles from Kurtz's station. Marlow wanted to keep going but the manager insisted on waiting out the night. Marlow was annoyed at being so close to his objective yet having to wait until the morning.

The novel opens with our narrator onboard a cruising yawl on the Thames River, awaiting the docking of the ship in the " biggest, and the greatest, town on earth", London. The ship is surrounded by barges, the air is dark, and the atmosphere is...